I’m excited to be playing the NoiseFloor Festival again after many years.
The last time was at the invitation of my good friend David Revill who was still lecturing at Staffordshire University where it’s hosted. The gig was great and I met quite a few people I was destined to cross paths with again – one being Leigh Landy whom I examined my first PhD with years later at UEA.
The most memorable pieces from that year were Leigh’s which was a quirky plunderphonics type work, Ben Ramsey’s (who was finishing his PhD at the time and is now a lecturer at Staffordshire), and mine, mostly because someone fell asleep in the second row and snored loudly through the entire performance.
This year I’m performing an even a more subdued piece so we will see how many remain conscious by the end of it. I’ve based it mostly on material I developed during a recent residency in Copenhagen with Airfield. During the residency we worked with ideas related to light, quantum physics and an imagined encounter between John Cage, Hilda von Bingen, and Moondog. The piece that resulted included musical quotes from Cage and Moondog, pictures and readings from von Bingen, and experiments involving bending light rays, quantum physics and the nature of reality. Airfield is anything if not ambitious.
For Noisefloor, I’ve planned something a little more modest and excluded all of the musical quotes, video and dance material (obviously), and worked mostly from my own contribution to the residency.
Here are the program notes for the work, provisionally called Residue:
Residue
In February of this year, I participated in a residency in Copenhagen with Airfield (myself, choreographer Ian Spink and filmmaker Alan Paterson). The residency initially drew inspiration from an imagined encounter between John Cage, Hildegard von Bingen, and Moondog; it evolved into an open meditation on the nature of light, chance and perception as framed by the music, writing and visual art of these three (and other) artists.
As is often the case with Airfield – the initial ideas were used more for method than material. Like the process of staining used in science, they helped illuminate underlying concepts, creative pathways and collaborative junctions that were previously unrecognized. They also left something of themselves behind, similar to resist-dyeing in which patterns are created by dyes filtered by a resistant agent such as wax.
My set tonight furthers this idea/method by drawing upon work related to the residency, minus any of the quoted material by Cage/Bingen/Moondog or the contributions of my residency-mates.
The notes are somewhat inaccurate as I ended up using a monologue from the residency (Why Cheap Art Manifesto) read by the actor Selina Boyack:
It was too good not to use, and gives my piece a narrative focus that is rare for me. Also, I composed this piece as an extension of the Airfield methodology which is when an initial idea leads to a realization that leads to another idea leading to another realization and so on. Plus it’s brilliant manifesto, as far as manifestos go.
Unusually (for me) Residue is a laptop set only and I am sans suitcase-of-doom and its ton of analogue components. The original call was for a 25 minute laptop performance with a set up time of the same duration, so it seemed a logical decision (if a somewhat uncomfortable one).
So not this:
But this:
NoiseFloor is from May 27-29, I perform at 6pm on the 28th.
For more information go here.
[soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/203438523″ params=”color=ff5500&inverse=false&auto_play=false&show_user=true” width=”100%” height=”80″ iframe=”true” /]